Experts Share the Building Blocks of a Successful Speaking Career

You’re passionate about sharing your message. You want to get your story out there. You know you could help people if you only knew how to reach them.

The advice out there is overwhelming. How do you figure out where to start?

We spoke with over a dozen professional speakers to find the best tips for launching a speaking career. These experts have spoken on stages across the country and worldwide, and they often command audiences in the thousands. But they had to start somewhere.

Read on for their advice. Make a plan to implement their ideas. Then put yourself out there to get started.

Walk the Walk

For speakers who want to use their words to change the world, the first step in the process has very little to do with speaking. It has to do with, well, changing the world—or at least your little corner of the world. Photographer and activist John Noltner emphasized the importance of believing and acting on your own mission before you ever set foot on a stage.

“You have to build the street credibility and the legitimacy that you’re actually doing the walk before you try to do the talk,” he explained. Speaking can motivate people to make change, but only if speakers can genuinely share their own experiences of getting their hands dirty.

Audiences can smell a fraud a mile away. Without authentic, sincere storytelling, speakers have very little chance of building a real connection with their audiences. That’s why it’s important to begin your speaking career by leading in your community, whatever that means for you. This will give you practice sharing with others, and, more importantly, it will give you a chance to listen. When you work to change your community among like-minded individuals, you’ll learn what matters to people and how your unique experiences might provide value to others who want to improve their own neighborhoods.

While this advice might be discouraging to those who feel ready to take the stage, the importance of grassroots work is impossible to understate. As Noltner said, “You don’t lead by giving a keynote. You lead by doing work that is worthy of a keynote.” You don’t have to be elected president to start speaking, but you should have some experience getting your hands dirty.

Establish Credibility and Value

Similarly, American Chess player, activist, and CEO of Queen’s Gambit, Ashley Lynn Priore, urges speakers to begin by developing their credibility. Priore has built an empire on her background, using her experience in chess to emphasize strategy and critical thinking. Her platform has allowed her to advocate for more robust educational policy.

But when she steps on stage, she doesn’t just talk about her incredible accomplishments. When she shares her work with audiences, she focuses on why and how those accomplishments can be valuable to the organization she’s pitching and their audience.

There’s a lot to juggle during a talk. You have to communicate a message, build a relationship, and establish your brand, all in the limited time of your speech or panel appearance. Sometimes, it makes sense to extend the work into other media.

Beyond her website and other digital content, Priore leans on her books to extend her message. “Putting out books helped my speaking career because it’s something tangible that people can take with them,” she notes. “Any event that I have, I pass out some books and say ‘what I’ve talked about is really surface level. To learn more, you’ll need to really dive into these books.’”

For many of the organizations she speaks with, her authorship credits provide credibility and help communicate who she is. By putting her voice on the page, she’s inviting audiences into a lasting relationship—one that extends well beyond the time she wraps up her talk and heads home.

Hone Your Personal Brand

Understanding your story is a crucial starting point to forging a lasting speaking career. But honing your brand goes beyond defining who you are and what you can do for others. Without a clear sense of who you want to serve, how you plan to help them, and why, you’ll struggle to connect with the right people, groups, and organizations.

As a diabetes awareness thought leader, Doris Hobbs stressed the importance of defining what you bring to the table. “You need to have your brand down,” she said. “You need to know what your mission statement is, your core values—you need to know all of that.”

The reason for Hobbs’ advice is three-fold. First, defining your brand will help you understand which messages and stories to include in your presentations.

Second, and just as importantly, if you don’t know your brand, you won’t know which organizations would be interested in hosting you. Defining your personal brand helps ensure that “you’re prospecting the right organizations,” Hobbs told us. Otherwise, you can approach dozens of organizations, but you’ll only create confusion—not your first gig.

Finally, embracing your “why” will help you get through the inevitable rejections you’ll face along the way.

Learn the Business

Hobbs’s advice highlights the importance of understanding the business side of professional speaking. While defining your brand is a critical first step, Jeremy Clark suggests pairing self-definition with industry understanding.

Clark, a mindset speaker specializing in uplifting young audiences, told us that most advice misses the mark. Most people are told to “Go to a speaker’s bureau website and see what people speak about and then choose your topic.”

He says that advice isn’t as helpful as people think.

Unfortunately, looking at common topics won’t tell you anything about the business side of becoming a speaker. Jeremy tells aspiring speakers that they shouldn’t just look at other speakers’ topics—they should look at other speakers’ journeys. When you look at the stories of the most successful speakers, you’ll see that they’ve had to work their way up.

That type of journey requires consistency. A successful speaking career won’t just fall into your lap. It depends on a routine that includes outreach, visibility, and networking in addition to practicing your content and delivery.

Create a Media Kit

Part of building a professional speaking platform is setting yourself up with the right tools. As you grow and develop as a speaker, you’ll likely adjust these materials, but once you have a sense of your personal brand and your business routine, it’s time to put together your media kit.

A beginners speaker’s media kit includes:

• Speaker’s biography: A brief bio including education, career achievements, expertise, and experience.

• Headshot: A high-resolution headshot that can be used for promotional materials.

• Speaker’s topics: A list of the topics you can speak on with a brief description of each.

• Contact information: Your email, phone number, and website.

• A one-sheet that combines all of the above.

A word of caution: as you’re putting together your materials, it’s easy to get hung up on yourself. After all, you’re really doing the thing! It’s exciting and scary! In situations like that, many of us get overly internal and focus on what we want rather than what our audience needs.

When organizations see Priore’s Media Kit, they know exactly who she is and what she’ll speak about because her topics clearly intertwine who she is and how she’ll help her audience.

Priore urges new speakers to consider, “What’s going to make you interesting to people?” She understands that audiences connect to speakers, not accomplishments. “Sometimes people do incredible work,” she says. “But if you don’t paint a picture of the human behind the work, audiences won’t connect.”

Your desire to connect with your audience should be clear in all of your materials—not just your presentation.

Build, Practice, Grow

With a clear sense of who you are and what you want to say, you can craft your message. Start with your signature talk—material that you can use over and over to reach your target audience at different venues across your region.

As Clark suggests, it can be helpful at this point to watch other speakers’ talks. Look at how they weave together their ideas and their stories. Ask yourself why particular parts of their speeches work and why others don’t.

Pay particular attention to their structure. You can use tried and true organizational patterns in your drafts.

But, Noltner warns, don’t assume you’ll be successful the first time you get up in front of people. He explains, “Speaking is a practiced skill. If you stand up and flop, that’s not the end of the story. You can learn from that experience. You can get a coach, you can find training, and you can get better at articulating your message.”

Local Toastmasters groups can be a great place to start for beginning speakers. You can also find speaking tutors online, including local coaches and those who can work with you remotely. Once you feel confident, pitch to a few smaller audiences, such as your local Chamber of Commerce or Rotary Club. This will give you plenty of opportunities to try, fail, reflect, and improve.

Embrace Rejection

Finally, speaking careers are just like other careers—they take time to build. In the meantime, expect a lot of rejection.

Hobbs spoke to this experience, recalling her failures early in her career. “I’ve had so much rejection in my life,” she shared. “But I believe every time you get a rejection, it’s just God’s protection. When a door closes on you, a better one is going to open.”

If, as Clark suggests, you’ve built a consistent habit of outreach and networking, your career will develop. You just have to keep showing up. Hobbs notes that speakers “need to be resilient because you’re going to get rejections.” Everyone has been rejected at some point, and most people continue to face rejection even after they’re established. It’s just part of the game.

Push Forward

As a parting word, Hobbs urges aspiring speakers to “Never give up. Just keep pushing forward.” With consistent effort, work behind the scenes, and a lot of practice, you can build a career that allows you to help others and pave the way for social change.

If you know you’re ready to start developing your message, we can help! Reach out to learn about how DAS Author Services supports aspiring authors and speakers.